Tag: perpetual war

At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington, DC, last week China was a big part of the agenda. The NATO summit’s final declaration mentioned the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) 14 times. It noted that “the PRC continues to pose systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security” and China’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values.”

The leaders of NATO “partner” nations Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia attended the summit. They collectively met NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to map out strategy for the Asia Pacific region. NATO announced four new joint projects with countries that are important to Washington’s bid to establish an anti-China military bloc. In response, Beijing accused NATO of “inciting bloc confrontation and hyping up regional tensions”.

Unsurprisingly, NATO frames its focus on China as defensive. “The PRC has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine”, claimed the summit’s final communique. According to this storyline, Chinese relations with Russia threaten NATO. But this is exaggerated. China has taken a cautious approach to Russia’s war largely complying with (illegal) US sanctions and refusing to sell arms (though its companies sell some dual use products to Russian firms). Conversely, North Korea and Iran are selling Russia arms while NATO countries are donating large amounts of weapons to Ukraine.

Comparing Chinese ties to India’s highlights NATO’s exaggeration. India is buying more oil and weapons from Russia than China and when NATO began its meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Moscow to meet President Vladimir Putin.

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It is now five years since Emmanuel Macron, in one of those blunt outbursts for which he is known, told The Economist, in a reference to the collective West, “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO.” 

The French president thereupon shocked officials across the Continent. “That is not my point of view,” Angela Merkel responded augustly. “I don’t think that such sweeping judgments are necessary.” Heiko Maas, the German chancellor’s foreign minister, added imaginatively, “I do not believe NATO is brain dead.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization celebrated its 75th anniversary last week, 32 presidents and prime ministers assembling in the same Washington auditorium where earlier leaders, 12 of them then, signed its founding treaty on April 4, 1949.

Joe Biden presided over the anniversary proceedings, of course. And with this in mind, let us credit the French leader for his prescience in diagnosing the condition of NATO’s cerebral matter.

As Joe Lauria put it in a Consortium News commentary at the summit’s conclusion last Thursday, this is an organization whose members are collectively losing their minds. 

It is important to understand what Macron did and did not mean with this remark. He was not, as might be easily misinterpreted, declaring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization purposeless or obsolete: That was Donald Trump’s line, and Trump was then three years into his presidency.

Macron, indeed, was reacting to Trump’s complaints about the alliance as a budgetary sinkhole and his, Trump’s, consequent failure to point the other members in the imperium’s desired direction, as all American presidents had since NATO’s launch as the Atlantic world’s premier Cold War military institution. 

Specific to the occasion of his interview with The Economist, Macron was unhappy about the mess then unfolding in northern Syria. Some readers may recall it: Trump had ordered American troops withdrawn — albeit an order diplomats, Army officers, and spooks soon subverted — and Turkey, a NATO member, had immediately piled in to attack Kurdish militias based in the region. 

“You have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies. None,” Macron told The Economist. “You have an uncoordinated aggressive action by another NATO ally, Turkey, in an area where our interests are at stake. There has been no NATO planning, nor any coordination.’’

And then the French leader’s punchline: “We should reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States.’’

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Thirty-four years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed and the West became convinced that this signaled the “end of history”. Western liberalism, they assumed, was the pinnacle of historical development and would gradually be adopted by all countries. They also believed that NATO would be its spearhead.

This ideological doctrine naturally gave rise to an idea of endless expansion – since the West leads the way towards the ideal and has the necessary global organizations for this, then everyone should strive to join it. How could it be otherwise?

At the time, it indeed made sense for countries from the former Soviet bloc and the Third World to join Western-controlled economic organizations which promised a common market, loans, portfolio investments, trade rules, and so on.

From the beginning, many people realized that this looked a lot like economic colonization, but, like any colonizer, at first the US convinced its new colonies that they would get all the perks of a large civilization. This made sense, and many countries expressed the desire to join the Western world.

For East European states, the idea of joining the European Union made even more sense. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell once compared Western Europe to a “garden,” and in the early 1990s the bloc indeed resembled a thriving garden. There were certain challenges, but at the time, the Old World came close to the ideal of a flourishing and prosperous society. It looked like it had found a balance between the market economy and socialism, and naturally, many countries wanted to join this community and also prosper.

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